Sci-Fi Beats With a Pacific Flavor

SEATTLE — It was a bright summer day here, but inside Shabazz Palaces’ studio, located in the Old Rainier Brewery building, it was dark as midnight. There were no windows, the walls were painted black, and the womblike interior was broken up only by a leopard-print rug. “Hip-hop should only take place at night,” said Palaceer Lazaro (real name: Ishmael Butler), 45, the mastermind of Shabazz Palaces, the eccentric experimental hip-hop act. “The parties, this, everything.”

That attitude could help explain the mysterious twilight sound of the band’s second full-length album, “Lese Majesty,” newly out on Sub Pop. The music is alternately languid and jarring, with melodies mutating or disappearing and Mr. Butler’s cryptic sci-fi raps often receding into the fabric. Almost everything about Shabazz Palaces seems slightly off-kilter, including their live performances, which have involved surrealistic masks and talk-show style interviews with the audience.

While outsiders might think the city’s hip-hop scene revolves around the ubiquitous white rapper Macklemore, the reality is more idiosyncratic and diverse. Shabazz Palaces are part of Black Constellation, a collective of visual artists (Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin and Nep Sidhu, who creates their stage clothing), fashion designers and musicians, including the rapper OCnotes and the avant-R&B duo THEESatisfaction, who host a series of parties called Black Weirdo in Seattle, Toronto, New York and Minneapolis.

“The world still doesn’t recognize that there is vibrant black culture here, because Seattle is thought of as such a white city,” said Riz Rollins, 60, a longtime D.J. for the city’s public radio station KEXP.

Dressed in an Eric André T-shirt, camouflage shorts and knee-high fuchsia and black socks, Mr. Butler was joined by the instrumentalist and producer Tendai Maraire, 40, the other half of the act. While Mr. Maraire agrees that the local hip-hop scene is diverse, “there’s no real hip-hop station at all in Seattle,” he said. “To get hip-hop, you’ve got to really search for it.”

Still, the city has enough of a scene that the local blog 206up.com published a Top 10 list of Seattle hip-hop records in 2013, which included artists like the Physics, Nacho Picasso and the young M.C. Porter Ray, who is also signed to Sub Pop.

Mr. Butler credits Seattle’s imposing landscape with inspiring some of his trippy creativity. “It’s, like, mystical with the rain and mountains and the fresh water and the salt water and the hills,” he said.

Image

Tendai Maraire and Mr. Butler performing as Shabazz Palaces at the 2012 Lacoste Live Concert Series in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.CreditTheo Wargo/Getty Images

He added, “It just breeds people that, to me, the people who I grew up with were super keen, intelligent, funny, creative and energetic.”

This is not Mr. Butler’s first time as a boundary pusher. In the early 1990s, known as Butterfly of the alternative hip-hop group Digable Planets, he helped popularize the jazz-rap subgenre with the hit 1993 single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” which earned a Grammy. But he doesn’t dwell on the past. “I don’t know how many pairs of pants or dresses or clothes you have from 1993, but I don’t have any of that stuff,” he said. “It’s the same thing with my musical ideas. Sometimes I look back and I don’t even —— ” He paused and shook his head. “That’s what I thought was cool?”

Digable Planets broke up in the mid-’90s, and save for a few releases under the name Cherrywine in the early 2000s, Mr. Butler mostly let his musical career dwindle; he took film classes at New York University. Though he and Mr. Maraire grew up a few miles from each other here, they never met until after Mr. Butler returned to the Pacific Northwest in 2003 to be with his ailing mother after 15 years or so away.

Mr. Maraire, the son of the Zimbabwe-born musician and scholar Dumisani Maraire, who died in 1999, had been working in music as long as he can remember. “Everyone was born and started performing,” he said of his large family with a laugh. On “Lese Majesty,” Mr. Maraire, a producer on the album, plays African instruments like the mbira (a thumb piano) and the hosho (a seed-filled gourd).

When he approached Mr. Butler about playing music together, “He said he didn’t do music” anymore, Mr. Maraire said. But Mr. Maraire was persistent, and after collaborating on Mr. Maraire’s project Boy Wonder, the two became good friends; at one point, they lived next door to each other in the Columbia City neighborhood here.

After self-releasing two EPs as Shabazz Palaces, the two put out their debut album, “Black Up,” in 2011 on Sub Pop, an indie rock label most closely associated with early Nirvana and Soundgarden and the halcyon days of grunge. The signing had raised a few eyebrows, but Mr. Butler admired the staff’s eclectic taste (“They just like music, man,” he said), and that the label was local was a bonus. The album was well received, with Jon Pareles calling it “darkly innovative” in The New York Times. “Yes, hip-hop still has an audacious progressive fringe,” he wrote.

“Lese Majesty” is even more ambitious, with seven “astral suites” (in the words of its news release) in a flowing, seamless stream. Megan Jasper, the executive vice president of Sub Pop, who has worked at the label for 17 years, said of Mr. Butler: “He is one of the most creative and expansive thinkers I have ever come across. I don’t think Ish has ever walked a straight line in his entire life.”

In person, the duo exhibited a lightness verging on goofy, trading quips. When asked about a recent photo shoot featuring Mr. Butler with two 14-foot pythons on a leash, Mr. Maraire explained why he wasn’t included. “I don’t do snakes,” he deadpanned.

While the concept would seem to be a sendup of mainstream hip-hop braggadocio, Mr. Butler said the shoot’s vision was simpler. “You could look at like, ‘Yeah, we like control and put a leash around the snakes,’ you know?” he said. “But at the same time, it’s just really [expletive] cool.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: Sci-Fi Beats With a Pacific Flavor. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe